Revenge of the Electric Car

Chris Paine would like to sell you a Tesla.

It’s back. No, not the practical, affordable consumer electric car—despite the claims made in Chris Paine’s Who Killed the Electric Car?, such a thing had never really existed. No, the most prominent resurrection in Paine’s follow-up film, Revenge of the Electric Car,
is the director’s overdramatic narration and penchant for snarky sound
bites from dubious celebrities. This time, instead of hunting for the
man who took his sedan away, Paine chronicles the creation of a new
generation of electric vehicles and the personalities behind them. His
tools are the same: ominous shots of oil platforms, free-flowing
hyperbole and a wise-guy chorus that includes Anthony Kiedis, Danny
DeVito and several Gawker editors.

The success of
Paine’s previous film has earned the director remarkable access, but at
the expense of coherence. His camera hovers over the shoulders of great
men of industry—Tesla Motors CEO Elon Musk, General Motors vice chairman
Bob Lutz and Nissan chairman Carlos Ghosn—but, beyond knowing that all
three are working on plug-in electric vehicles, Paine doesn’t seem to
know why we’re there. We are treated to odd shots of business lunches
and photo shoots, unflattering angles of stockholder meetings and a lot
of powerful backs. Paine lingers on any potential conflict, giving the
film the tone of a Discovery Channel building competition.

Fittingly, Paine’s
fourth subject is a regular on Discovery: Greg “Reverend Gadget” Abbott,
a mustached metalworker who makes large sculptures and refits vintage
cars to battery power. He’s a colorful character, but shockingly
foolish: After he loses his uninsured workshop to arson, he buys a new
building without bothering with an inspection. It turns out to be so
polluted he has to abandon it.

Paine’s inclusion of
Gadget, among executives who, despite their flawed personalities, at
least get things done, is troubling. The film would have been better
without the sideshow, and better still had Paine focused more on Musk.
The Tesla (and PayPal and SpaceX) founder is the most interesting and
troubled of the executives, and gives Paine the greatest access. We see
him sweating through meetings with buyers, fighting with his fiancée and
staring down bankruptcy as his company struggles to deliver its
appallingly expensive, near-handmade sports cars. Next to overpuffed
Lutz and closed-up, calculating Ghosn, he seems present and fragile. We
want to believe in him, as does Paine—he already bought his Tesla. PG-13.